In my last post, while working through the ways music4dance does and doesn’t handle artists, I wrote that I was “pretty sure I’ll implement an Artist Index of some kind in the foreseeable future.” It turns out that the foreseeable future was about ten days. The artist index is live, under Music → Artists.

Browsing

The page starts with the hundred artists who have the most songs, which is interesting in its own right — the top of that list is as much practice/ballroom orchestras as it is the names you’d expect. From there you can type any part of a name into the search box or click a letter to browse. As of this writing, there are 15,093 artists in the index; the 5,986 of them with more than one song are the ones you see by default, and there’s a link to include the rest.

Artists rather than credits

The part of this feature that I think matters more is what happened to the artist pages themselves.

Until now, an artist page matched the whole artist field as a phrase, so the Dolly Parton page listed the songs credited to exactly “Dolly Parton” and nothing else. That’s why, in the last post, the best I could offer for “Islands in the Stream” was a link to an advanced search. Now the system reads each credit and pulls the individual artists out of it, so that song sits on Dolly Parton’s page and on Kenny Rogers’ page, and both halves of the credit are links wherever it appears.

Her page picked up four songs it didn’t have before, plus an “Also appears with” line pointing at Kenny Rogers, Ricky Van Shelton, Vince Gill, and Willie Nelson. The credit itself is never rewritten — the song details page still shows exactly what the source said.

This also cleans up the case I’ve been frustrated with since 2016. The Prince pate is now 28 songs, including the ones credited to Prince & The New Power Generation, and Prince Royce is a separate entry in the index with 53 songs of his own, rather than something I have to apologize for in the middle of a search.

Where it falls short

Unsurprisingly, a free-text artist field doesn’t give up its contents easily. I only split a credit where there’s real evidence for it — a “feat.” or a slash, or a name that already carries songs of its own — because the failure I least wanted was a band name torn in half.

The bigger limit isn’t the splitting, though. When I measured our credits against a sample of Spotify’s structured ones, about 28% of the credits in the catalog turn out to involve more than one artist — but 80% of those credit strings contain no separator at all. Spotify knows a song is by two people; our copy of the credit just says the first one. No amount of cleverness gets a name out of a string it isn’t in, so this picks up roughly a fifth of the collaborations that are really out there. Closing the rest of that gap means going back to the services for better data, which is a project for another day.

A couple of smaller things: spelling variants are still separate artists, so P!nk and Pink each have a page, and the index itself rebuilds every few hours, so a brand-new song can take a little while to turn up there (the artist pages are current immediately). And the larger caveat from last time still stands — the artist field is still text, not a proper relational thing with artists as first-class objects. This is the incremental version. It just turns out the incremental version covers most of what I actually wanted.

If you’d like to help

The Artists help page has the full details, including how to correct an artist list on a song. If you land on a page with songs that don’t belong there, or find a credit that clearly should have been split and wasn’t, please let me know. And if you’d enjoy doing some of that cleanup yourself, send me your music4dance username and I’ll turn on editing for your account.

Step of the Month

The  “Step of the Month” for September is still the ask from the last post: which Dolly Parton songs are your favorites to dance to, and what style of dance? I’m particularly interested in hearing from Country Western dancers. Feel free to respond to this post, use the general feedback page, or add the songs and vote on existing songs directly. Her page is a better place to start than it was two weeks ago.